What is the NSF PIRE Award?

"Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) is
an NSF-wide program that supports international activities across
all NSF supported disciplines. The primary goal of PIRE is to
support high quality projects in which advances in research and
education could not occur without international
collaboration. PIRE seeks to catalyze a higher level of
international engagement in the U.S. science and engineering
community."

"International partnerships are essential to addressing critical
science and engineering problems. In the global context,
U.S. researchers and educators must be able to operate effectively
in teams with partners from different nations and cultural
backgrounds. PIRE promotes excellence in science and engineering
through international collaboration and facilitates development of
a diverse, globally-engaged, U.S. science and engineering
workforce."

You can learn more about the PIRE program by visiting the
NSF homepage, and you can also read
the abstract for NANOGrav's
PIRE award.

The telescopes that will be used (bottom), along with the so-called "Hellings and Downs curve" (top), or the expected correlation in pulsar timing residuals as a function of angular separation that we expect to detect. Arecibo (Puerto Rico), the Green Bank Telescope (GBT; West Virginia), Lovell (U.K.), Effelsberg (Germany), Nan\c cay (France), Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT; Netherlands), and Parkes (Australia) are currently contributing IPTA data. The Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA; New Mexico), Deep Space Network (DSN; California), Sardinia Radio Telescope (SRT; Italy), and the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST; Australia) will soon begin to contribute. The Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT; India) and three under-construction telescopes -- CHIME (Canada), Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST; China), and MeerKAT (South Africa) -- will be new additions under our proposed PIRE program. CHIME, FAST, and MeerKAT are all expected to be completed around 2016.

This material is based in part on work supported by the
National Science Foundation under Grant
Number 968296. Any
opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations
expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do
not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science
Foundation.